Battle of wills over Mostar raises stakes

Date: 01/08/1996

By Elizabeth Wise

IT WILL take all the courage Bosnians and the international community have to pull off the much-awaited elections next month. And right now, the EU looks decidedly uncourageous.

If all the parties had stuck to the original script, the Union would have blazed a trail for successful elections by creating the first multi-ethnic government in the divided city of Mostar.

But the 30 June polling of Mostar's Muslims and Croats, watched by the world and - more importantly - by other Bosnians, has been a qualified disaster.

In rejecting results which showed Muslims winning more votes, Mostar's Croats have undone two years of EU work. The Union's administration of the town, set up in July 1994

to foster the first area of reconciliation in the war-torn country, was to have given birth to a joint Muslim-Croat municipal government and police force, and led the way for Muslims, Croats and Serbs throughout former Yugoslavia.

European leaders are shaken. In Brussels, diplomats and officials can barely conceal the their governments' jitters.

“If this Mostar administration fails, it will be a very bad omen for the Dayton peace agreement and the whole Bosnian Federation,” said an aide to Foreign Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek. “We really have a problem.”

Ambassadors of the Union's member states meeting last week emerged with an ultimatum which underlined the depth of their concern: they decided to give Mostar's Croats a week to change their minds, or face the prospect of the EU administrator, officials and police force stationed there pulling out.

The Croats have until this Saturday (3 August) to decide. If they do not accept a city administration which gives Muslims a few more posts than the Croats, Sunday will be the day the Union coach turns into a retreating pumpkin.

On that day, the EU administrator (known since election day as the EU envoy because Mostar's citizens are now the nominal administrators of their own city) becomes the leader of a wind-up operation called “Rear Party”.

The withdrawal of the 30 to 40 officials and 150 policemen wearing Western European Union (WEU) hats would take a few months, so the EU would still have a presence as Bosnians vote elsewhere in September.

But the image of Union officials retreating would not be helpful during the campaigning season, to say nothing of how damaging a mixed report card on the WEU's first sustained overseas mission might be to the organisation's future credibility.

“It is a hard line to take, but if we do not take it now, the Bosnian Serbs can say next month that they do not accept the results of the 14 September elections,” said one.

Bosnian Croats could well do the same. Acrimony between them and the Union is growing in the wake of European charges that Croat mafia led the election boycott. Croats respond that Europeans are ignoring the will of 27,000 Mostar citizens.

The only bright note about Mostar is that the EU has the authority to do something about it. It can do nothing single-handedly about the other obstacles in the path towards Bosnian elections.

One of these is what to do with Radovan Karadzic, who has just resigned as Bosnian Serb leader but still apparently pulls the strings. Everybody but the Bosnian Serbs wants to see him tried at the war crimes tribunal, but disagreements remain over whether he should walk to The Hague as a free man or be dragged there in handcuffs.

In mid-July, Germany and the Netherlands argued in favour of arresting Karadzic, while others feared this would turn him into a martyr. Since then, France's defence minister has called for NATO to be given the power to hunt down war criminals, while London has urged caution. But as one Commission official says, with audible relief: “It is a matter for others, not the EU.”

The Dayton accord sponsors or the UN Security Council would have to make the decision to arrest him, and NATO's international peacekeeping force (IFOR) would have to execute it.

EU-US tension has already arisen over election planning, but again that is not the Union's responsibility. It is contributing money and ballot boxes, but the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will be running the show and monitoring the outcome.

International High Representative Carl Bildt, in charge of international reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, will convoke a meeting of his steering board today (1 August) to assess Karadzic's role and the Mostar election failure, as well as reconstruction progress thus far.

EU reconstruction money has been flowing to Bosnia's Muslim-Croat Federation, but not yet to its Serb republic, and the Commission last week began lobbying European industry to invest in Bosnia.

European foreign ministers, political directors and ambassadors are likely to be wearing their pagers during the August holiday, alert for sudden meetings with American and Russian peace treaty sponsors.

While they are in charge of neither the elections nor peace treaty implementation, Union member states do have a large say in IFOR, the OSCE, the peace implementation group and the Dayton contact group and still, therefore, have a chance to influence the outcome.

When EU foreign ministers meet in Ireland on 8-9 September, a week before the elections, they will have a last chance to use that influence.

“They will not be pretending they are the UN or NATO,” said an Irish diplomat, “but they could make a big impact.”